Beloved icon of Windows history appears to be in the rear view for good

For those upset about the lack of a start button in Windows 8, prepare yourself for another disappointment -- "Windows Blue", an upcoming short-cycle successor to Windows 8, is not expected to bring the feature back.

The source of this supposed leak is CNBeta, a site with close insider ties at Microsoft Corp. (MSFT), which gained respect by accurately leaking a number of early Windows 8 details.

Other info from the site includes suggests that Microsoft will further flatten the UI on the desktop (think the Metro/Windows 8 UI style), the taskbar/desktop will get tweaks, the price will be low (or free), and the new kernel version number will be v6.3 (corroborated by other independent reports). The final remnants of the Aero UI, which was a staple of Windows Vista and Windows 7 is also being bid adieu, like the Start button before it.

The start button went the way of the Dodo with Windows 8. [Image Source: Jason Mick/DailyTech]

Neowinreports that a summer launch of Windows Blue is expected. And its contacts close to Microsoft hint that the name will be some sort of riff on Windows 8, not Windows 9, as some suspected.

(For the record you can get a Start Menu-like menu by moving your mouse to the lower left corner of the screen and right-clicking. Voilà, magic!)

I remember Win 95 and there were a number of free market UI's around for windows...including Symantec or Norton. When XP came out and copied a number of these UI features the market tanked.

Could new UI's be produced to simulate Win 7..or windows in general? Or has MS snuffed that possibility with their API's and licenses, etc?

I for one really dislike the general look of Win8 and the tiles. But I will add the caveat that I haven't used Win8. Heck I never used the cartoonish look in XP, instead falling back to the "classic" look of win 95.